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Interview by Andrew Jack (@AJack)

How did you become a translator?

I read a lot of literature at college, where I studied ancient Greek, which was the first language I translated. I started studying Russian literature during perestroika. Recently, I’ve been translating Finnish contemporary poetry—for fun, as it were, for the time being—in addition to working full time as a professional translator from Russian to English. It doesn’t matter what the language is, you should have a good amount of in-country experience and lots of varied reading under your belt to be able to get your bearings in a new text, to know what is what. My adviser at the University of Washington (Seattle) used to lead annual summer hikes in Olympic National Park. We’d be walking in the forest, he’d point to a plant, rattle off the name in every language he knew and say, ‘Translators have to know everything, and since that’s not possible, you have to know when you don’t know something, know that you need help, and find someone who knows and can help you’…

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Interview by Andrew Jack (@AJack)

Tell us about your background: why did you become a graphic artist?

I never made such a decision consciously.  It just happened to be this way.  One day I started doing graphic reportage (I prefer this term).  There wasn’t a discussion in my family about me becoming an artist – my artist father had decided on that even before I was born.  I was never though attracted to easel painting – if I needed to draw, I would rather draw in the graphic design format.  I wanted to become a book illustrator when I was a teenage girl.  I graduated from Moscow State Print University as a “book artist”.  After that I spent several years as a commercial magazine illustrator, also trying to do something in the sphere of contemporary art.  I felt happy, everything fell into place, only when graphic text appeared in my work.  With each work text acquires a more and more important role – it is not just some commentary to drawings, as it used to be the case in the beginning, but the drawings themselves become illustrations to the text…

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Interview by Andrew Jack (@AJack)

Where does your interest in Russia come from?

My father was a conductor at what is now the English National Opera when I was born. His fellow conductor had a remarkable Russian wife with a very strong personality. Our two families were close so I heard a lot about Russia when I was little. I started learning Russian in 1950. I then spent my military service in Vienna, but I resumed my Russian studies at university, and I was first posted to the embassy in Moscow in 1963. I didn’t go back permanently for some time, though I did spend much of the intervening period dealing with east/west issues, defence, and Soviet affairs. I was Moscow from 1988 to 1992 as the Soviet Union fell apart. I've visited it many times since, and I've written a number of books which are centred on Russia. That's given me the opportunity to get to know Russians from all walks of life I would not otherwise have met…

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Interview by Andrew Jack (@AJack)

How did you come to translate 'Stalin’s Meteorologist'?

I translate from French, including Georges Simenon for Penguin Classics. Harvill Secker asked if I’d be interested in translating this book. I read it and I was captivated. Previously, I’d translated [the French academic] Marie Mendras’ 'Russian Politics', but this was very different from anything I’d done before. I prepared a sample which Olivier [Rolin, author of Stalin’s Meteorologist] approved…

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Interview by Andrew Jack (@AJack)

Why did you become interested in Russia?

It was a question of curiosity first and then chance. I must confess that I was a Maoist in my youth but never pro-Soviet. Ever since I was a child I was fascinated when I looked at maps and saw the stupefying size of Russia. Plus I was interested in its central role in the history of the twentieth century: the enormous hope the October Revolution kindled, then the horror that followed. In 1986, when the Soviet Union started to open up, I wanted to see what it looked like. What interested me was to see what people were like, not the politics. I wrote a book of my impressions afterwards, En Russie. Now I have been there 30 times and written several books on it – it’s certainly by far the country where I’ve passed most time…

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Interview by Andrew Jack (@AJack)

What is your background?

I was born in 1956 in Moscow, raised there, went to Moscow State University and then to graduate school in Texas after a year in Lisbon. I got my degree in 1989 and have been teaching Russian history ever since, first at Wake Forest in North Carolina and then at the University of California, Berkeley. As an undergraduate, I studied literature and linguistics. I changed disciplines as well as countries, and discovered all sorts of new things. I was drawn to history in general, the history of the Soviet Union and questions having to do with nationalism and ethnicity…

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Interview by Andrew Jack (@AJack)

What inspired you to study the Soviet Union?                

Growing up in the 1950s, I was a news junkie interested in the Cold War. I remember seeing Khrushchev riding through Central Park in a limousine in 1959. My mother’s parents came from the Black Sea and spoke Russian. Pretty early on, I began puzzling over how a movement that had begun with a vision of heaven on earth (namely Marxism) could end up with a Stalininst killing field. I wanted to figure that out, so I began majoring at college in Russian history, and eventually made that question a main theme of my course on Soviet politics…

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Interview by Andrew Jack (@AJack)

How did you become interested in Russia?

I’ve always been interested in history and psychology and literature – those fundamental questions about understanding human behaviour. I took a lot of different history courses in college and university. What really drove me to be interested in Russia was the poetic way some of these questions were answered. I’ve always been impressed by the Russian tradition of valuing the word. I remember vividly taking Russian intellectual history, which gave me the chance to read the great novels and plays. I was just so intrigued by the intersection of the historical and the aesthetic in the Russian canon…

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